Collaboration & Email: Designing Tools for the Problem at Hand
Today we use email for everything from sending messages, delegating tasks, collaborating on documents and files, to managing contacts and more. Many of us would be crippled without our email accounts but at the same time we are bogged down with overflowing inboxes. A study from Basex Research (Q4 2008) shows that businesses lose an estimated $650 billion in productivity annually from unnecessary email, which accounts for an average of 2 hours/day per worker.
Many online collaboration platforms have proposed that the solution lies in a unified set of tools for managing different types of information more effectively rather than trying to manipulate email functionality to fit our needs. Today I came across this whitepaper released by HyperOffice that I think does a great job of breaking down the issues of email overload and proposing solutions based around enterprise collaboration software.
